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Microsoft has released the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 Power Tools. One of my favorite and useful (Thanks Gilles) command that the power tools allows us to do is the Undo Unchanged. When you checkout a file but not make any changes, by default, Visual Studio will commit the file, but you can remove automatically all these unchanged checkout files with one action.
In order to be able to use this command, in Visual Studio 2013, go to Tools | External Tools… Then create the command like below:

Visual Studio 2013

The Visual Studio team at Microsoft has been working very hard to release Visual Studio 2013 (and all tools around) on time. S. Somasegar has published this morning at 4 AM (PST) a blog post to announce the online availability of the last version of your favorite IDE. So if you have an MSDN subscription you can download today Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 from your MSDN Subscription Download page. If you don’t, no need to worry, you can download for free the Express edition of Visual Studio 2013. I have been playing a bit with the RC version and one of the feature I like (besides all the amazing work done by the ASP.NET team) is the possibility to link your Microsoft Account to Visual Studio.

Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2

Today is also the official release of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. You should be able to download the update for Windows 8.1 directly from the Windows Store. I haven’t done it yet since I have downloaded the full version from my MSDN account, but I’ll try to install it on another computer using this process. Read the official blog post from the Windows team for the release of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

Visual Studio 2013 RC

A lot of new products this week! From the operating system to the development tools, everybody will have a great weekend, downloading, installing and playing with the new products 🙂 Microsoft has released this week the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2013 with a Go-Live license. In other words, you can use Visual Studio 2013 RC for production purposes. The RTM version will be released on October 18th. This new version of the development environment brings a lot of new features around the XAML editor, the business applications, TFS… For more information, I invite your to read the post of Somasegar – Announcing the Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 RC 3

More quietly, Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 RC is also available. This small update will be the last one for Visual Studio 2012 and brings only bug fixes. The RTM is planned for the end of the year and more release candidate are expected. I recommend you not to install this update except if it fix a critical bug that is blocking you.

Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 are RTM

After all, it seems Microsoft is listening to the partners. Windows 8.1 was not supposed to be released before October 18th to the developers but… today you can connect your MSDN or TechNet account and download Windows 8.1 RTM and Windows Server 2012 R2 RTM. However, be careful because the download does not include an update process from Windows 8.1 Preview. You will have to install all your computer again…

The Microsoft BUILD 2013 is now over. The Visual Studio team has been working very hard to present the new Visual Studio 2013 preview. I hardly recommend you to have a look at the sessions on Channel 9 about this new edition (not a basic update) of your favorite developer tool. Here are some of my recommendations:

If you want to have a quick overview of all the work done by Microsoft for any products, I highly recommend to look at the Keynote Day 1 and Keynote Day 2.

In the last months I’ve been working a lot on Web development projects (using MVC Razor) and looking at the next IDE, I can’t wait to get the final build. Beside the fact that the Web designer has been rebuild from scratch which make the evolutions much easier, the integration with Windows Azure has been improved and you’ll be able to control almost everything on your cloud account with Visual Studio.
Download Visual Studio 2013 Preview today and try the new features of the IDE. For those using Visual Studio 2012, the Update 3 has also been published but very quietly.

The Silicon Valley Code Camp is the biggest free conference of the Silicon Valley. On October 5th and 6th, come to learn about any technology (not only Microsoft) at the Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, CA. And this year, I have the change to speak with Eugene Chuvyrov (@EugeneChuvyrov) about Windows Azure Mobile Services. We will show you how to integrate Azure Mobile Services in your existing applications running iOS and Windows Phone.

Time to market is critical in mobile application development, and new cloud-based technologies are here to help you get your apps out the door faster. By abstracting back-end operations and using a powerful SDK, Windows Azure Mobile Services allows you to focus on creating beautiful native User Interfaces on the web (HTML 5), iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8 devices and coding custom logic for these platforms. In this presentation, Eugene Chuvyrov and Fabien Lavocat will demonstrate how a single backend hosted on Windows Azure Mobile Services powers both iOS and Windows Phone devices. Taking advantage of the data from Dun & Bradstreet Developer Challenge, they will demonstrate a mobile CRM system that they created for these platforms.

The Windows Phone Developer team has updated / added new samples to help developers making great applications for Windows Phone. Each sample contains enough information for you to start learning a new feature or just get a idea for a new application. Open your Visual Studio and start downloading the samples. Here is the list of the last updated samples:

Microsoft is presenting Windows 8.1 update at TechEd North America in New Orleans, LA and at the same time published information about Visual Studio 2013 and new benefits about Windows Azure for MSDN Subscribers.

You will not be charged if your Virtual Machine is stopped. All your deployment state is preserved.

Monthly Windows Azure Credits and usage

After a first month with $200 credit for any MSDN subscriber, depending on your subscription level (Professional, Premium or Ultimate) you will get respectively $50, $100 or $150 to use for any Windows Azure service for dev/test purpose. And that’s the big point here. You are not anymore allowed to use your MSDN subscription to publish any Windows Azure service for production purpose. If you still want to be able to do so, you will need to refuse the new offer, sign into the account portal, and next to your Windows Azure MSDN subscription you will find the option to opt out of the conversion. Microsoft BizSpark Startups are not concerned by the dev/test purpose limitation. Get more information regarding the BizSpark program.

MSDN Rates for Windows Azure

On top of the new credit based account, MSDN subscribers will also benefit from lower rates for some services. A picture is more efficient that a long text, so here are the discounts you will be able to enjoy.

MSDN Software

Another great thing coming with this announcement is that you are now allows to use your MSDN licenses on Windows Azure. In other words, you can publish a Virtual Machine with any software coming from your MSDN account. (except client OS)

Today I’m facing a new challenge with IIS (Internet Information Service) of one of my Web Site on Windows Azure. As you probably know, after a few minutes of inactivity, IIS will go take a nap and will wake up at the next incoming request. It means after about 15 – 20 minutes, if your web site did not receive any incoming request it will pause itself. And the following request will take longer because the web server needs to start. It can be a problem for the guests visiting your web site or consuming your services. One solution is to use Windows Azure Mobile Services and more precisely the Scheduler feature.

Saturday April 27th, 2013 was the day of the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp (GWAB). With more than 90 locations all around the world, GWAB was THE world-wide event about Windows Azure. Thanks to @RobinDotNet I had the chance to give a 15 minute presentation on how I use Windows Azure Mobile Services in my application Earthquakes for Windows Phone. Today I’m going to share with you, on this blog, my presentation and at the same time, add some details and answer some questions I received after the talk.

Microsoft has released this morning Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 and Team Foundation Server 2012 Update 2. You should read the very interesting post from S. Somasegar about what’s new in this update. The development of this update was focused on five main points:

Agile planning

Quality enablement

Unit testing

UI testing

Microsoft Test Manager

Test Case Manager (Web Access)

Windows Store development

Line-Of-Business development

LightSwitch

SharePoint

Phone tools

General Developer Experience

Blend for Visual Studio 2012 supports Sketchflow, WPF and Silverlight

IDE, the Blue theme if VS 2010 is back.

Code map

Workflow designer

IntelliTrace

Performance and reliability

To learn more about the details of each improvement or features, please read the KB2797912. You will note the come back of the Blue theme of Visual Studio 2010, that was the top requested feature on the Visual Studio UserVoice. But, are you really going to use it? On my side, I’m using the plugin Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor with the theme Dark with Light Editor. I’ll install the Update 2 of Team Foundation Server later today. Do not hesitate to send your feedbacks on Visual Studio UserVoice, Microsoft is using it a lot to improve their tools. It would be silly not using it. And of course, Microsoft Connect to report bugs.